Word: offing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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The retreat was temporary. The strapping redhead won his first battle at age 13. At 20 he defeated the usurpers. He fought successfully for and against the French King. He made a dynastic marriage, over papal objections, to the daughter of the powerful Count of Flanders. (William was 5 ft...
On the Bayeux Tapestry, the astonishing embroidered storyboard of the Battle of Hastings, one can see Edward the Confessor of England dying in January 1066 and Harold Godwinson, an earl, enthroned. A woolen comet (Halley's) streams across a linen sky, auguring bad luck. William, who believed the English crown...
William was crowned that Christmas morning. Had he merely conquered, England would still have been pulled from its semi-Scandinavian orbit and into the ferment of Western Europe, and English would still have been transformed into a different language, one with words that came by way of France, words like...
When Dante Alighieri compiled his great medieval Who's Who of heroes and villains, the Divine Comedy, the highest a non-Christian could climb was Limbo. Ancient pagans had to be virtuous indeed to warrant inclusion: the residents included Homer, Caesar, Plato and Dante's guide, Vergil. But perhaps the...
That figure was Saladin. It is testament to his extraordinary stature in the Middle Ages that not only was Saladin the sole "modern" mentioned--he had been dead barely 100 years when Dante wrote--but also that a man who had made his name successfully battling Christianity would be lionized...